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Why are people gathering in the cities?

A lot has changed in a 100 years time. Since the world wars, and with the quick development of the internet and other technologies, society requires less and less people to gather resources and transform them. The so-called primary and secondary sectors is getting more and more autonomous not only regarding food production and other primary resources, but also manufacturing of utilities and other tools. A clear example is the automotive industry, that makes cars almost with no direct human intervention, whereas some decades ago it required hundreds of people to make.

Instead, people have moved to different jobs like sales, design, management, engineering, programming, or what we can define as tertiary sector. It is a needed sector, and one only humans can do. We could discuss why so much energy and effort is used to sell more and more, using too much of the world's limited resources, but that's not the point of this essay. The point is that, as supported by the United Nations figures (1), people are gathering more and more in the cities, since that's where human minds are needed.

Smarter transport and energy

Ironically the best places to have a healthy living are actually out of the cities, where air pollution is not a major issue. But one still needs to drive to the city isn't it? Because most jobs are nowadays located in the cities. So it seems obvious that we need to make cities much better places to be, since more and more people gather there for a myriad of reasons. And what drives a city? That's right, energy.

A better use of energy is one possible way out of the snowball cities are in regarding pollution. First of all, most cities can gather much of the energy they need thanks to this huge ball of fire that greets us everyday: the sun. By providing aids and rentals for solar panels, municipal governments can avoid the use of non-renewable energy plants that inevitably pollute the city air (even if they are far away!).

Second, cities can use that same energy to power electric vehicle charging, making smart use of the excess energy produced by their citizens (through smart meters, people can sell the energy they don't use). Electric vehicles are already establishing as a solution to both air and noise pollution. Also, the same electric vehicles can help making the energy grid more stable using Vehicle-to-Grid technology.

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But...

The use of electric vehicles is cheap, clean, and as I said above can use resources made by the city itself, instead of importing energy from the deserted interior. Actually it is so cheap that in some cities, travelling in an electric car is cheaper than train or bus, because even if the train or bus are electric, they still require drivers, workers, a company, and all kinds of liabilities. People will prefer travelling by car, which even being not-polluting, it still clutters roads and parkings... So, how can we incentivise people to travel in public transports?

(1) http://www.un.org/en/development/desa/news/population/world-urbanization-prospects-2014.html